It’s one of those crossroads that I can’t seem to figure out how to cross. I’ve done so many career assessment quizzes that I know to-the-tee what I’m “supposed” to be good at. But I don’t think that any career assessment quiz can help you to answer the deepest internal questions you have.
Questions such as:
What is my unique talent?
What am I passionate about doing?
What have I done before that made me feel that I was really living?
Asking these questions and trying to find answers to them has been something I’ve been doing consistently now ever since I got home from my mission, so for 3 years this last September. I’ve pondered and pondered and pondered. I’ve read self-help books, from “Major in Success” to “Think and Grow Rich.” I’ve studied ancient philosophers, poets, and Prophets.
I’m not sure if I’ve come any closer to figuring out what I should be doing with my life.
I think part of it is that there are too many choices. My long term goal is to start my own company and create real value for others. But in what industry? With what product or service? Should I start a scalable company or do something local and from home? Should I work for a startup before I do my own? Or should I work for a big corporation before starting something up to get a feel for how the corporate world operates? Or should I scrap that and do consulting? But don’t consultants get a skewed view of business since they don’t have to ever stay anywhere long term?
Or I could just skip all these steps and start something right now. A few of the things I’m interested in:
1. Web Analytics (Omniture, Google Analytics, etc.)
Why I’m Interested in This Business:
It’s scalable; after building the initial technology I can work with hundreds or thousands of different clients with the same platform.
It’s very valuable to a web business. Knowing the behavior of your customers is huge. If you don’t know where they come from, which search terms are performing the best, which conversion tunnels are doing the best, if you don’t perform A/B tests, if you don’t understand your traffic you don’t understand your business. And if you don’t understand that, you don’t have any way to progress.
It’s sustainable. As the internet continues to expand, web analytics will only become more important. The growth in analytics will go with the growth of e-commerce and internet-driven sales.
Possible plan:
Partner up with somebody who understands technology at a much deeper level than most; somebody who can build a web app with his eyes closed and knows analytics. (All I know is Java, HTML, and some SQL & PHP. Hardly the technical ability necessary to build this kind of platform).
Charge small business with websites $100 a month to have access to the analytics data.
Charge small businesses who want 1 on 1 consulting from one of our experts a starting rate of about $2000 a month.
Continually upgrade and build our technology to make it the fastest, easiest-to-use analytics software available for small businesses.
2. Wealth Management
Why I’m Interested in This Business:
It’s interesting to try to understand how the financial system works. From buying chunks of public companies (aka buying stocks) to private equity, monetary policy, the pro’s and con’s of the Federal Reserve, asset preservation, the bond market, and hedging with gold and silver; it’s interesting stuff. I like reading about the world, its history and the current events.
I enjoy thinking about how political decisisons affect the economic world. I enjoy seeing how economic policies can affect entire countries, and even the world.
I like helping people, and the financial business is a people business.
Possible plan:
Get all necessary licenses.
Work for Euro Pacific or another firm that specializes in international investing in the developing Asian countries.
Learn everything I can about the business and work like a dog to grow up my clientelle.
Start my own.
There are several other ideas that I throw around, and I know that eventually I’ll figure this all out, but lately it’s been really stressful thinking about all of this. As I move forward it does get more clear; what I should do that is. But I’m impatient. I like seeing results. I like feeling that I’m creating something that is of value to somebody else – preferably from scrach, preferably with a group of people that I get along with like brothers and who are much smarter than I am (I want to be able to learn from others).
Any comments about what you think would be helpful!
